The 1.5 year old 60GB drive in my G4 PowerBook recently became sick and died. Sad, I know. I had SuperDuper clones that were up to date on two external firewire drives, but getting them to boot proved to be difficult due to the malfunctioning internal drive...both clones usually boot and run perfectly. Even when the internal HDD was not set as a startup/boot drive, the computer tried to find it, causing the problems. Pressing the option key at boot to let me choose the startup volume would either never complete (no startup menu) or sometimes complete if I picked the computer up and tilted it 90 degrees! I actually read other PowerBook owners with dying drives have had similar "success" tilting and shaking.

Anyway, I could never find a solution to disable the dying internal drive (without physically removing it) allowing me to boot from my external cloned drive, which certainly cuts down on the usefulness of the clone in an emergency. I ended up replacing the internal drive, and now can boot from the clones again.

So...my question is does anyone know how to disable the internal drive when it's dead/dying?